Kickbacks.ai: An Ad in Your Claude Code Spinner That Pays You to Wait

A VS Code extension turns the ‘thinking…’ word in your Claude Code or Codex spinner into a one-line ad and pays you about 50% of the revenue. The catch is what it changes on your machine to do it.
cyber-security
software-engineering
Author

Kabui, Charles

Published

2026-07-03

Keywords

kickbacks-ai, claude-code, vs-code-extension, ai-coding-ads, supply-chain-security

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Andrew McCalip’s company ShiftKeys built Kickbacks.ai, a VS Code extension that sells the word your coding assistant shows while it works. When Claude Code or Codex is busy, it normally prints a random verb like “Discombobulating…”. Kickbacks swaps that for a short, clickable sponsored line capped at 60 characters, and pays you an estimated 50% of the ad revenue for each five-second view. Advertisers bid for the slot in a live auction, from about $0.50 per 1,000 views. Your balance ticks up in the editor’s status bar, and you cash out through Stripe once you pass $10. The company says it has paid developers $121,597, with an example month near $40.

The clever part is also the risky part. To place the ad, the extension rewrites your Claude Code or Codex install in place, and tucks your sign-in token into your operating system’s keychain. You sideload it, installing a downloaded file from the command line, not from the vetted VS Code Marketplace. One developer reading the public source noted it checks for updates every 90 seconds with no signature check, so a bad update could reach everyone fast. That is a lot to trust for a spinner.

This is becoming a small category, not a one-off, with copycats like IdleAds and Bacon pitching the same deal. Each asks you to let ad software modify the AI tools you code with, the exact supply-chain surface that scanners like NVIDIA’s SkillSpector exist to check.

Read More: ClawHub and the risk hiding in the agent-skills supply chain.

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Citation

BibTeX citation:
@misc{kabui2026,
  author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
  title = {Kickbacks.ai: {An} {Ad} in {Your} {Claude} {Code} {Spinner}
    {That} {Pays} {You} to {Wait}},
  date = {2026-07-03},
  url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/kickbacks-ai-get-paid-claude-code-spinner-ads/},
  langid = {en-GB}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Kabui, Charles. 2026. “Kickbacks.ai: An Ad in Your Claude Code Spinner That Pays You to Wait.” https://toknow.ai/posts/kickbacks-ai-get-paid-claude-code-spinner-ads/.